The past couple of weeks I’ve been running on low energy. After the 60k weekend and then the relay weekend last weekend, my training runs have been on tired legs and I haven’t had the get-up-and-go that I usually do. Thankfully I’m not operating under some kind of external pressure to be productive and I’m not internally giving myself a hard time for not being super productive right now. But, I did get some new shoes…so off we go.

Last night sometime around 7:30 the clouds blew in. Earlier we had a thing for work on Zoom and I messaged Matt to see if he was down for a socially distant hang like we’ve been trying to do the last few weeks. I had a couple of sours in the fridge, Martin House True Love, and so I grabbed them and headed out the door to Matt’s place around the corner. As I was walking down the sidewalk, a father and son rode by on their bikes and a bit further down the street I saw Matt walking my way. We hopped across the street to the picnic tables out in front of the PDC and cracked open the beers. This is the end of Matt’s second year teaching and we were unpacking the year and how bizarre things have been and what we might be walking back into in the Fall, or not walking back into. We walked back to Matt’s place so I could pick something up from his plushie business and meet the lizard that has taken up the room I was in last summer. On my way back home, the temperature started dropping and the wind picked up and the storm blew in pretty quickly.

I got home and made a quick run to Midway for beer and then headed back home to make dinner and relax a bit after what was a kind of stressful week. I think that we are all pretty ready for school to be wrapped for this semester so we can deal with the fallout and then move on. My son decided on Wednesday he was going to spend the day in his pajamas and not do any school work, my daughter was a little surly and thoughtful and I felt like I was bouncing back and forth between work things and kid things and kid school things…the storm washed all that stress out the door and when I woke up this morning I felt peaceful and ready to face the day.

I made coffee and started watching Unbreakable the Western States film from 2010, my cousin Bea let me borrow the DVD a few years ago so I knew how things were going to end. What stuck out this time was all of the physical contact that people were making with each other. Pats on the back, a hand on a shoulder, people leaning on each other and being close together. Intimacy between competitors and, you’ll just have to trust me on this, the look that Anton Krupicka gives Geoff Roes at the finish line is just so charged with energy after going hard for 100 miles…it was enough to make me want to get out in the downpour and get a couple of miles in the rain.

So I did. I went bombing around the TWU campus through more than ankle-deep water, splashing in all of the puddles and hopping from curbs with some abandon and joy that I haven’t really tapped into in on a run in a while. I probably looked like a little kid playing in the rain and it’s a good place to be.